‘The core of experience – to be at the core of experience transcends the need for lesser pleasures,’ Sharn told himself. He could feel his black notebook in his hip pocket. It was inaccessible inside the space-suit. For all his inability to get at it, it might as well have been left back on Earth. That was a terrible loss – not just to him, but to others who might have read and been stimulated by his work. Words were coming to him now, thick and rich as blood, coming first singly like birds alighting on his shoulder, then in swarms.
Finally he fell silent, impaled under that black gaze. The isolation was so acute, it was as if he alone of all creation had been singled out to stand there … there under something that was physically impossible.
He switched on his suit mike and began to speak to Dominguey.
‘I want to come back aboard. I want to make some calculations. I’m beginning to understand Bertha. Her properties represent physical impossibilities. You understand that, don’t you, Dominguey? So how can she exist? The answer must be that beneath her surface, under unimaginable conditions, she is creating anti-matter. We’ve made a tremendous discovery, Dominguey. Perhaps they’ll name the process after me: the Sharn Effect. Let me come back, Dominguey. …’
But he spoke to himself, and the words were lost in his helmet.
He stood mute, bowing to the black thing.
Already Bertha was setting. The foggy blanket of atmosphere was whipped off the bed of rock, following, following the sun round like a tide. The vapour was thinner now, and little more than shoulder high as its component molecules drained off into space.
The weight-shift took place. Sharn’s body told him that down was the monstrous thing on the horizon and that he walked like a fly on the wall across Erewhon. Though he fought the sensation, when he turned back towards the Wilson, he moved uphill, and the vapours poured across him in a dying waterfall.
Taking no notice of the vapours, Sharn lumbered back to the air lock. He had remembered the thick pad of miostrene that hung clipped to one wall of the lock, a stylo beside it. It was placed there for emergencies, and surely this was one. As he reached for it, Dominguey’s voice came harshly through his headphones.
‘Stay away from that lock, Sharn. I’ve got the casing back on the cyboscope and am preparing to blast off. I shall have to take a chance on manoeuvring. Get away from the ship!’
‘Don’t leave without me, Dominguey, please! You know I’m an innocent man.’
‘We’re none of us innocent, Sharn, isn’t that true?’
‘This is no time for metaphysics, Dominguey. We’ll discuss it when you let me back inside.’
‘You killed Jim Baron, Sharn, and I’m not letting you back on board in case you kill me.’
‘I didn’t kill Baron, and you know it. I’m not the killer type. Either you killed him, or else Malravin did. It wasn’t me.’
‘I’ve got your confession! Stand clear for blast-off!’
‘But I’ve made an important discovery!’
‘Stand clear!’
The connection went dead. Sharn cried into his suit. Only the universe answered.
Clutching the miostrene pad, he ran from the lock. He ran after the last disappearing strand of vapour, sucked along the ground like a worm withdrawing. He lumbered down a cliff that began to see-saw back towards horizontal. The big sun had disappeared below a group of rocks that did rough duty for a horizon.
A tower of distorted strata rose before him. He stooped behind it as quickly as the suit would allow him, and looked back.
A golden glow turned white, a plump pillow of smoke turned into flat sheets of vapour that flapped across the rock towards him, the ship rose. Almost at once, it was hidden behind the northern horizon. The movement was so sudden and unpredictable that Sharn thought it had crashed, until he realised how fast ship and planetoid were moving in relation to each other. He never caught another glimpse of it.
Calmer now, he stood up and looked round. In the rock lay a great crater. The last of the smoke was sucked into it. He hobbled over to it and looked down. A great eye looked back at him.
Sharn staggered away in alarm, running through the passages of his mind to see if delusion had entered there. Then he realised what he had seen. Erewhon was a thin slab of rock holed right through the middle. He had seen Bertha louring on the other side. In a minute, it would rise again in its tireless chase of this splinter of flotsam.
Now the illusion of day and night, with its complementary implication that one was on a planet or planetoid, was shattered. That great eye held truth in its gaze: he clung to an infinitesimal chunk of rock falling ever faster towards its doom.
As he squatted down with his pad, the sun came up again. It rushed across the arch of space and disappeared almost at once. Erewhon bore no trace of any vapour to follow it now. And another illusion was gone: now, plainly, it was the chunk of rock that turned, not the mighty ball that moved – that was stationary, and all space was full of it. It hung there like a dull shield, inviting all comers.
He began to write on his pad in big letters. ‘As this rock is stripped of all that made it seem like a world, so I become a human stripped of all my characteristics. I am as bare as a symbol myself. There are no questions relevant to me; you cannot ask me if I murdered a man on a ship; I do not know; I do not remember. I have no need for memory. I only know what it is to have the universe’s grandest grandstand view of death. I –’
But the rock was spinning so fast now that he had to abandon the writing. A spiral of black light filled space, widening as he drew nearer to Bertha. He lay back on the rock to watch, to stretch his nerves to the business of watching, holding on as his weight pulsed about him in rhythm with the black spiral.
As he flung the pad aside, the last word on it caught his eye, and he flicked an eyebrow in recognition of its appositeness:
‘I –’
The reek and noise at the back of the circus were familiar to Javlin Bartramm. He felt the hard network of nerves in his solar plexus tighten.
There were crowds of the reduls here, jostling and staring to see the day’s entry arrive. You didn’t have to pay to stand and rubberneck in the street; this lot probably couldn’t afford seats for the arena. Javlin looked away from them in scorn. All the same, he felt some gratification when they sent up a cheeping cheer at the sight of him. They loved a human victim.
His keeper undid the cart door and led him out, still chained. They went through the entrance, from blinding sunshine to dark, into the damp unsavoury warren below the main stadium. Several reduls were moving about here, officials mainly. One or two called good luck to him; one chirped, ‘The crowd’s in a good mood today, vertebrate.’ Javlin showed no response.
His trainer, Ik So Baar, came up, a flamboyant redul towering above Javlin. He wore an array of spare gloves strapped across his orange belly. The white tiara that fitted around his antennae appeared only on sports day.
‘Greetings, Javlin. You look in the rudest of health. I’m glad you are not fighting me.’
‘Greetings, Ik So.’ He slipped the lip-whistle into his mouth so that he could answer in a fair approximation of the redul language. ‘Is my opponent ready to be slain? Remember I go free if I win